A large number of mobile terminals currently offered to be used in GSM based cellular networks includes features to send and retrieve email using the well defined and established internet protocols SMTP and POP3 over CSD, HSCSD, GPRS and UMTS.
Some Carriers offer email services to their customer base today, which can be used also to send and receive email with mobile terminals. But only a small number of customers are using this service offering.
One important reason for the limited market acceptance is the user individual configuration of the mobile terminal. Without this very technical and error prone configuration it is not possible to send and receive email on a mobile terminal.
To enable POP3/SMTP capable mobile terminals to use email services of a mobile operator, in existing solutions it is required to configure a number of parameters on the mobile terminal. These parameters include:                For email retrieval:                    Name of the email server to receive email from            Username for email retrieval            Password for email retrieval                        To send email:                    Email address of the sender            Name of the email server to be used for sending email            Username for sending email (if necessary)            Password for sending email (if necessary)                        
While some of the parameters are individual only for the mobile operators email service, others are specific for the individual user. This applies for:                Username for email retrieval        Password for email retrieval        Email address of the sender        Username for sending email (if necessary)        Password for sending email (if necessary)        
A significant number of parameters are required to be configured individually by the user.
The usual solution provided in the mobile operators environment to configure mobile terminals for certain services is named “over the air configuration” (OTA). This means to configure the terminal by sending a short message to the terminal with the individual configuration parameters. Since this message is formatted in special way, the receiving terminal interprets the message as a configuration command.
However, today's terminals usually do not offer the ability for email parameter configuration over the air. The user is left alone to configure the terminal as required. Additionally the service provisioning process of operators usually does not contain this configuration automatically. Therefore even if the phone can be configured over the air, the customer must be aware of this and obliged to get the configuration—which is unlikely in most cases.
WO02/49373A2 discloses a method and arrangement for configuring a mobile telephone. Like with other prior art it has the disadvantage that it is required to configure the phone (manually or automatically) before it can be used by the customer to access the operators mail service. Especially it is required to provide customer particular data like username, password or personal name. Another disadvantage is that in case the customer changes, or is forced to change, a part of his relevant configuration and individual data (e.g. mail address, username, password, mail server name), it is required to change or refresh the handset configuration. Yet another disadvantage is that a handset specific adoption of the service is required.